In particular he is talking about the mountains and rangelands of New Mexico. Always shaped by fire, lately they have been shaped by fire suppression. Always modified by grazing elk and other animals, now they are threatened by overgrazing of livestock. Always vulnerable to drought, now they are stricken by drought and heat together. And the heat is not the heat of a normal warm year, it is the heat of human-induced climate change, he says.
“Say hello to the Anthropocene,” he writes, using a relatively recent coinage for the geological time we live in. Not the Holocene — the name earth scientists give to the era that began about 11,000 years ago, when the last glaciers of the last Ice Age made their last retreat — but the Anthropocene, the new era when people’s actions alter conditions on Earth.